


on the cusp of in-between

by blackeyedblonde



Category: True Detective
Genre: '95 Era, Creepypasta, Gen, Halloween Challenge, Paranormal, Psychological Horror, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-13
Packaged: 2018-04-29 07:46:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5120525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackeyedblonde/pseuds/blackeyedblonde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You never did answer me that one time,” Rust says, checking his gun on his belt before tucking his notebook up under one arm. His cigarette’s down to its last leg and he sucks hard enough on the filter that it squeaks between his lips.</p><p>“Bout what?” Marty murmurs, looking down his nose to fumble with the zipper on his windbreaker again.</p><p>Rust squints ahead into the forest even though the sun isn’t bright here, pressing his lips into a thin line. “About whether or not you believe in ghosts.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dienda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dienda/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文 available: [[translation] 无间边缘 on the cusp of in-between](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8115439) by [hieroglyphics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hieroglyphics/pseuds/hieroglyphics)



> For Gloria, who inspired much of what you'll find here when she told me about [The Stairs,](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/3iex1h/) which appears to be part of a creepypasta story originally shared on reddit. I've been pondering a lot of unexplainable creep and liminality and glitches in the greater matrix lately, so that's probably some of what we'll be exploring ahead.
> 
> Happy Halloween!

  
The station parking lot is mostly dead at half past seven in the morning, alight with that glinting shade of newborn yellow that makes Rust’s molars ache when he looks at it for too long. His hands are clammy around his ledger and it’s mostly quiet, again, save for the sound of Marty yanking the zipper on his windbreaker up and down until one of the teeth snags free and lets him zip clean up to his throat.

“Fucking freezing,” he murmurs outside the door of their work car, sniffing as he peers at Rust over the metal roof. “And what’s with all these goddamn birds?”

There’s probably a hundred of them altogether, dotted in black on every surface they could light on in the parking lot. Black smudges hanging on oak branches and mingling on the station window ledges, peering down at them from the power line and even perching on the side mirror of Geraci’s car. The noise they make is the kind of deafening that turns into a quiet drone, and maybe it’s odd, Rust thinks, how he can hear Marty just fine over their cawing voices.

“Murder,” he says more to himself than to Marty, unbothered by the crows so long as he doesn’t catch the dull reflection of any black-beaded eyes in his.

“Well, Rust,” Marty says with a slow blink and a sigh, pulling the driver’s side door open before palming his thermos off the roof of the car. “Murder seems to be the driving force for everybody this morning, don’t it.”

Rust’s right forearm is starting to itch and he flexes his hand like that might somehow keep his own bird at bay, but the others are getting louder and there’s not another soul in the parking lot that isn’t clad in black feathers of some kind outside Marty Hart with his shining halo of corn silk hair.

“Let’s get on,” Rust says, opening his own door and sliding into the familiar shape of the passenger seat. “Got a long drive ahead of us.”

Marty cuts him a look but only sucks down a deep swig of hot coffee, falling behind the wheel with a grunt and a swear when he drops the keys in the floorboard.

“Shit,” he says, and for a moment a hot bolt of panic starts to rise in Rust’s stomach, like maybe they’re running out of time and something’s nigh on coming, but then the feeling bleeds out like exhaustion when Marty finally fishes his keyring from between his feet and cranks over the engine.

“Last fucking thing I wanna do on a morning like this is go trawling for shit in the woods,” he says, backing out of the parking spot with his neck craned over one shoulder. “Major upstairs in his heated office acting like we both went through search and rescue training like a couple Mounties, when he knows damn well this kind of fieldwork should be left up to the bloodhounds.”

Rust squints out the window as they roll toward the exit, listening to Marty fiddle with the heater in the dash. He’s cold in his windbreaker but only presses the spine of his notebook harder into his stomach, vaguely struck without warning by the thought of a knife blade pressed there, dull and dark.

The Chevy pulls out onto the highway and Rust doesn’t say anything when he watches the murder of crows rise up into the air all at once in the side mirror, taking wing through the morning sunlight as they swarm and dissolve in the opposite direction like a cloud of black smoke.

  
  


Olivia Lamar had gone missing at a rest stop off I-10 back in the spring of ’94, six long months before Rust would step into Quesada’s office and shake Marty’s hand.

She was seven years old when she disappeared, last seen wearing a pair of violet cutoff overalls and her Sunday school shoes. She had a headful of dark curls and wide hazel eyes framing a bad overbite leftover from an unbroken thumb-sucking habit, and the only reason Rust had made much note on that last part is because that’s all that they could recover from the crime scene a week before when her remains had been kicked up by a group of teenagers likely set out to smoke dope in the woods: maxilla and mandible, both picked and sun-bleached clean, all the upper teeth still intact with the lower jaw cleaved neatly in half.

The teeth had looked like tiny freshwater pearls under the coroner’s lamp, laid out on the stainless steel table more kindred to something set up for a museum exhibit than the broken pieces of a little girl. Rust remembers being offered a pair of rubber gloves and declining, counting the teeth from a distance like they were age rings circling the heart of a tree. He’d known it was Olivia before the dental match came back, and the pinched look on Marty’s face that lasted long after they stepped out of the morgue meant that he knew the same.

But now it’s the dead-end of October ‘96 and they’re winding down the back of the I-10 like a brown garden snake, retracing a familiar path to the rest stop just past the 287 highway marker. Prior to the week before Olivia Lamar had been missing for two and a half years with no trace or lead on where she’d gone outside one little white shoe, and their files indicate a search team had combed through the state forest around the rest stop for three days but never come back up any wiser.

“I never took an eye off her for more than a minute at a time,” the girl’s mother had said on the phone when Marty called, voice wrung out hoarse since the moment they’d gotten the confirmation. She was back in North Carolina with her husband and two remaining children, now ten and thirteen years old, and would be flying out to claim her daughter’s remains once they were cleared from the investigation. “We stopped to eat lunch at the picnic tables, and when I got finished packing the cooler back up she—she was gone. She was just gone.”

Rust sat across from Marty at his desk, marking points in his notebook while he listened to one side of the call.

“She said, and I quote, ‘It was like she disappeared into thin air’,” Marty reiterated after he had hung up the phone, pressing both thumbs into his eye sockets like he was nursing a building headache. “They already did a round of questioning back in ’94 but even then she says there wasn’t any other car around the picnic area, nobody loitering around. Asked local PD about vagrants in the area and they tell me most usually tend to steer clear of the rest stop but don’t got a clear finger on why.”

The seventeen-year-old boy who’d found Olivia’s jawbone with the toe of his high-top sneaker had told a different story.

“We were just out there—y’know, exploring and shit,” he said, idly swiveling from side to side in a chair pulled up alongside Rust’s desk. Lutz and Demma had a suspect on deadly assault with a tire iron roasting in the box and Joshua Parrish had come in on his own for what Marty called some _peaceable questioning, Rust, for fuck’s sake_ _,_ sipping around a can of Dr. Pepper dumped out of the breakroom vending machine while he eyeballed the sketch of a familiar mandible bone in Rust’s ledger.

“Mmhmm,” Rust hummed, leaning back in his own chair to tap a pen against his mouth. He didn’t say anything about the dime bag of weed they’d found squirreled away in a tree not twenty yards away from the crime scene. “You ever notice anything odd or out of place out there? Maybe something like a hobo camp, shit up in the trees—indicators that maybe folks were messing around in the area.”

Joshua started swiveling faster at the mention of shit stowed in the trees but didn’t break, taking another careful sip of his soda. “Naw sir, nothing like that, we never knew anybody to stick around out there. It’s always been real fucki—uh, real quiet out there, you know? Real quiet.”

Rust put the pen down on his desk and reached for a half-pack of cigarettes instead, tapping one out into his hand. “Sounds to me like you’re talking a certain kind of quiet,” he said, putting the smoke between his teeth before palming his old zippo. “You wanna talk some more on that?”

It’s posed like a question but they both know it isn’t one. The lighter clinks shut and Joshua’s eyes follow smoke curls climb toward the ceiling before he wedges his coke can between his thighs and lets the borrowed chair stops swiveling with a straining creak.

“Word is we ain’t really supposed to talk about it or mess around,” he said, swallowing as he blinked at Rust from the corner of one eye and then turned to watch Marty hen-pecking on his typewriter across the desk. “But all the guys say that, you know, just trying to scare the younger kids and stuff.”

“What’s that?” Rust asked on exhale, eyes cast low while he taps ash into the tray on his desk.

Joshua’s face screwed up for a moment like he’d had to yank the truth out of his craw, and Rust had gotten two more hours of sleep than usual the night before but that still wasn’t enough to keep him from turning the broom closet into an interrogation box if he’d snagged an alibi for it.

“Uh—we call ‘em the stairs,” Joshua said. “Since that’s what they are and all, just some stairs out there.”

Rust’s eyes had flicked up, one hand exchanging the cigarette for his pen again. He flipped open his ledger and scrawled something in black on a half-empty page. “The stairs,” he echoed, and then Joshua started pivoting in the chair again.

“I’ve only ever seen them one time,” he said, quicker than before. “And I ain’t ever touched them.”

“Y’all come across an old homestead, you think?” Rust asked, not paying any mind to the telltale sound of Marty’s typewriter keys falling quiet.

“No sir, I couldn’t make out any sort of foundation,” Joshua said, words dropped down toward the can still in his lap. When he looked up there was a sheen of sweat shining on his forehead and upper lip, waxy and pale under the fluorescent office lights. “They weren’t any kind of wood, either—looked like concrete to me, maybe something else. I didn’t get too close.”

Across the desk Marty made an abrupt noise in his throat before clacking out two more keys on the typewriter. “Kid, you got some brass coming up in here weaving out reefer dreams on the station’s dime.” He shook his head and reached the end of his ribbon with a metallic ding, sliding the bar back down. “Shit, Rust, maybe you should ask him about that little baggie we found kitty-corner from the crime scene. I bet this Stairway to Heaven leads right to it.”

Rust leveled Marty with a glare before focusing back on Joshua again, testing the wild jackrabbit look slowly setting up camp in his eyes. “They lead down into the ground?” he asked. “Maybe an old root cellar, something like that.”

By then Marty had resumed his typing and Joshua simply shook his head, drawing in a lopsided sort of breath. “They led up,” he said. “Straight to nothing.”

“And you’re sure you haven’t done any messing around out there?” Rust asked him, tapping the point of his pen on the desktop while he waited for an answer to sweat out. “Haven’t seen anything that might be of interest to the investigation?”

“No, sir, it’s real quiet out there,” Joshua said with a shake of his head, idly picking at frayed cotton threads in the holes of his jeans. “Real quiet.”  
  


~*~*~*~  
  


“You asked three different state departments about those fucking stairs and still can’t accept that stoner kid was running you for a wild one,” Marty says with a laugh and amiable shake of his head, reaching down to pull his thermos out of the cup holder. The cabin of the Chevy’s warm enough now that he’s finally pulled the zipper on his jacket and gotten pinker in his cheeks than the tip of his nose. “Highway patrol, fish and game warden, goddamn sanctioned roadside cleanup crew—they ain’t seen anything of the sort, and I don’t need to bet big money that they think you’re crazier than a shithouse rat for asking.”

“Just following up on the leads, Marty,” Rust drawls, adjusting the elastic band on his notebook as he watches the 234 highway marker flash by through the window. “You might remember veering off the beaten path has sometimes got a tendency to produce results we ain’t gonna find in the ten square feet around a fucking desk.”

Marty snorts and steers with one hand, fingers braced low and lazy on the wheel while he gestures around the cabin with his thermos held in the other. “Oh, I recall just fine,” he says, glancing over at Rust. “I’m just thinking the same shit probably don’t apply to phantom staircases sitting out in the middle of the woods, but I ain’t been working this job steady for eight years or nothing, so don’t mind me.”

Rust sighs and spreads his hands down his thighs, watching the startup of heavy morning traffic gather around them as cars merge in off the flanking entrance ramps. It’s cold enough that they’ll see a puff of exhaust every now and again, bursting like a cloud of poisoned breath in the air.

“If Major wants us to do another walk-through, we could stand to be thorough,” Rust says. “Just want to see what the fuck’s out there past the tape-off point.”

“Some trees,” Marty says, merging into the right-hand lane as their exit starts coming up ahead. “Some fucking dirt. Maybe another dime bag if we’re lucky.”

The rest stop is standard highway fare, last renovated in the early 80s and then mostly left to fend for itself outside the periodic visits from state maintenance. It’s made up with a pair of low brick buildings divided into his and hers restrooms and a handful of vending machines chained to the ground on the front walk. There’s a lone water fountain up under the awning with its metal face kicked in and a fresh coat of white paint on the women’s restroom door that doesn’t match the original beige, shaped in such a way that Rust can figure out the slur hidden underneath without letting his imagination stretch too far.

A trio of semis are spread out in the truck lot, all three sleeping giants with visors thrown up in the windshield to hide their drivers away from the midmorning sunlight trying to pry inside. Behind the restroom buildings are a half-dozen wooden picnic tables tucked up under sun-bleached awnings, and beyond that, the start of the tree line that leads into the thick brush of untouched Louisiana wood.

Marty parks the car in a spot close to the covered tables but doesn’t get out right away, letting the engine idle while warm air still pools from the vents and cocoons around him. The sky looks greyer here than it did in Baton Rouge, the grounds just as empty and quiet, all the crows and their murder replaced by a single pair of speckled mourning doves that peck through the grass by the nearest picnic bench. A black trash bag has turned inside-out in a metallic mesh can bolted to the ground and ripples in the dying breath of October like some dark specter come to life.

Looking out the window, Rust can see and taste the cold before he even feels it.

“Never did much like these places,” he says, reaching into his windbreaker’s inner pocket to pull out a cigarette. The old zippo won’t catch on the first or second light and Rust mumbles low around the stick between his teeth, dampening the filter with a single swear. “Been to plenty in my day, they all feel the same.”

Marty kills the engine and watches Rust finally suck down the first pull, cracking his door to blow smoke out into the cold air. “How’s that?” he asks, running the tip of his tongue along his bottom lip before a thought strikes. He clears his throat and promptly reaches across the center console and pop open the glove compartment, letting the plastic door flop against Rust’s knees.

“Nothing about them is permanent,” Rust says, watching while Marty shuffles through old receipts and his crumpled car registration, a battered tire gauge and a pack of peanut butter crackers. “Like an in-between place on the map—too many people coming and going all the time, shit starts to blur. Sort of liminality, maybe.”

“Lemme tell you what,” Marty says, finally finding the squeeze-tube of medicated lip balm he was digging around for and palming it before snapping the glovebox shut. “I’m thinking that blurry part sounds more like a personal problem. It’s just any old rest stop, man—a shitty one, yeah, but I’m thinking it’s solid.”

He rubs a little of the minty salve on his bottom lip before pocketing the tube, and the way the smell carries on the air makes little sprigs of green shimmer across the windshield, drawing any comeback Rust had on the tip of his tongue back in. But then Marty’s nudging the car door open, standing up into the open air as a gust of wind ruffles his hair in a gold cowlick.

“Alright Davy Crockett, you’re leadin’ on this one,” he says, watching Rust unfold himself out of the passenger side and blow a stream of smoke into the air. “Far as I gather it, I’m just getting in a few extra steps off the treadmill this morning.”

The pair of mourning doves are gone, and Rust never saw them take wing to the air but there’s a pair of crows in their place now, watching him from the lawn with their black eyes shining. Something shifts behind them in Rust’s peripherals and when he glances up it’s gone, like a smudge somebody wiped away from a camera lens.

He jams his door shut and lets Marty lock up before they step over the curb and start trailing through the dry grass, heading for the tree line ahead.

“You never did answer me that one time,” Rust says, checking his gun on his belt before tucking his notebook up under one arm. His cigarette’s down to its last leg and he sucks hard enough on the filter that it squeaks between his lips.

“Bout what?” Marty murmurs, looking down his nose to fumble with the zipper on his windbreaker again.

Rust squints ahead into the forest even though the sun isn’t bright here, pressing his lips into a thin line. “About whether or not you believe in ghosts.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

  
It must’ve rained hard the night before.

The leaves and soil making up the forest carpet are still cold and wet beneath Rust’s boots, hardly making a sound while he and Marty break through the tree line and head northeast. The idle _tap tap_ of a woodpecker echoes somewhere overhead, a strange sound for this late in October, and when Rust throws his eyes skyward to search for the telltale pinprick of red he can’t seems to pick it out of the foliage.

“Crime scene’s about a quarter-mile in from here, I think,” Marty says, sniffing as he stuffs his hands in his windbreaker pockets. “I reckon you remember the way.”

“I do,” Rust says, watching the trees and the way the ground moves ahead of them, the way it’s been contoured into the earth like the grooves between rib bones. The forest floor is mostly flat but there are nooks and crannies water-carved by hard summer rain, leaving tree roots exposed in arthritic fingers and sandy gullies deep enough for a child to lie down in.

Rust presses his ledger into his side and tries not to think too much on how they look like open graves.

The treetops here aren’t so dense as the thick brush of conifers he remembers in Alaska but weak-tea daylight still struggles to break down to the woodland floor, casting latticed shapes that shiver and shift along with the rustling leaves. Marty’s suede work shoes are already dark with dampness and he should’ve damn well known to wear his field boots today, but there’s no point in worrying about it now.

“You got any idea on what we’re lookin’ for out here?” he murmurs now, stepping around a tree root bent up like a gnarled knee. “Figure we got lucky with what we did find—imagine two years out she’d be scattered from here to Timbuktu by now. You know how—how the animals drag stuff out for miles, sometimes.”

Rust knows alright, has known since he was knee-high—knew it when Travis had called halt ten miles away from camp on an autumn morning in 69’ when they were just a hair north of Juneau’s outskirts, looking down to admire something long and capped off with a mangled leather boot caught between the clenched jaws of what looked like a bear trap.

“Pop,” Rust had said, glancing from the shinbone back up to his father, dark head haloed by the burning midday sun. “I thought you said the traps couldn’t—”

“They can’t,” is all Travis had said, giving the trap a jarring prod with his walking stick before continuing their forward march through the woods. “Somethin’ must’ve gotten to him before help did.”

And so the rest of Olivia Lamar could’ve been spirited away to the top of the Ozarks for all Rust and the rest of Louisiana CID knows, but he doesn’t figure as much. And by all measures that should be what they’re out here looking for, but it doesn’t seem too likely they’ll find anything more than some of Marty’s so-called trees and fucking dirt.

Like what’d been left behind had been a mistake, maybe. Just the long side of a wishbone won in a lucky fluke.

“Any signs or indicators of ongoing activity,” Rust says a handful of cues too late, and Marty has to blink before he recognizes it as a response. “Whatever we can find out here that might spin the weathervane to what we’re looking for—could be a matter of abduction versus an attack.”

“Uh-huh,” Marty murmurs, sniffing hard and wet enough that Rust knows he’s starting to work on the low end of a head cold. “Some of your Nobel Prize talk for ‘ain’t got a fucking clue,’ then. I’m thinking Quesada just wanted us out of the bullpen for the day so you wouldn’t be crawling in Steve’s hair without a case to run o—”

His words don’t so much as cut off cold as they sink down into the back of his throat, like the last consonant was swallowed in a hiccup. Rust’s eyes cut up like a switchblade and Marty already has a hand thrown out and pressed flush to the other man’s chest, fingers dragging down the line of his sternum before they fall away into the open air.

“What the fuck,” he says almost conversationally, squinting at the barrel-chested oak in front of them. “Is that.”

Marty doesn’t need to touch it to recall how the glass-drop stares of a thousand dead eyes feel, looking down on him from where they would line of the walls and ceiling of the old taxidermist’s shop down in Erath. But he moves in front of Rust anyhow, reaching out to press the pad of one thumb against the glass sclera covering the gold-colored iris.

“Fucking fake eye,” he says, stepping back so his palm slaps against his thigh. “In this fucking tree. Out here in the middle of the woods.”

Rust doesn’t touch it but reaches around to pull the knife off his belt, flipping open the blade while they peer at the unblinking taxidermy eye staring back. It’s slightly cloudy and dirty but couldn’t have been out here too long, considering the tree hadn’t grown around and swallowed it whole yet.

The tip of the blade sinks too easy into the bark around the glass eye, easy enough that Rust fumbles and staggers a step behind too much pressure where it wasn’t needed. The knife sinks a full two inches into the heart of the tree where he twists it, brow tightening up at the familiar sound that echoes in his ears, more like fat being scraped off fresh hide than the give of wet wood.

“Shit, man,” Marty says after a moment, watching the eye plunk out of the tree and hit the ground. “Just occurred to me that might’ve been a piece of evidence.”

But Rust doesn’t answer him, watching copper-bronze sap well and drip down the bark of the tree through a hole where the eye had been. It’s runny enough that it almost looks like warm maple syrup, and when the air sparks with a hint of something sickly-sweet Rust’s mouth itches and fills with saliva.

Marty steps back, though, holding a hand up to cover his mouth and nose while his eyes well up in kind. “Shit reeks,” he says, coughing a little before taking another step back, face pinched up in disgust. “Smells like a possum three days dead on the blacktop.”

Some of the sap is on the tip of his knife and Rust brings it up to his nose, wonders if the amber would taste like caramelized sugar if he pressed the blade to the tip of his tongue. But Marty is busy retching, using the toe of his shoe to kick dirt and leaves over the glass eye, and when Rust looks back up at his knife the amber has gone wet and ruby-dark.

He feels the corners of his own eyes pull tight but doesn’t say a word, only wipes the blade off on a piece of low-hanging moss and clips it onto his belt. Counts back the notches in his head like tide markers and figures this is the first vision he’s had in nearly three weeks.

“Come on,” he says, and Rust’s got an evidence bag folded in his back pocket and ten more in the car but neither one of them bothers to find the glass eye again. The smell of warm syrup and caramel is still hanging in the air but Rust fights the low growl in his stomach, tearing his eyes away from where blood is dripping down the hull of the tree from a single stigmata.

Marty doesn’t seem to notice it, falling into close step beside Rust as they move deeper into the wood. He’s gone wary enough as they move further that he looks like some blond hunting dog on its rookie season, senses tuned into everything and nothing at once, and Rust is busy thinking about whether he’s the hunter and Marty’s the hound or maybe the reverse when he notices how their footfalls are landing dry.

“Parched as a bone,” Marty murmurs aloud, kicking up dust motes and leaves at their feet. The closest ash tree looks like a petrified femur sticking out of the ground and there’s barely any foliage cover here but it’s dark, somehow—like the day is beginning to die even though Rust’s watch face doesn’t even read noon.

“How much ground do you think we’ve covered?” he asks, looking up to blink at Marty. The other man slants him a narrow look but they don’t stop walking, each footstep falling with an echo like they’re scouting at the bottom of a canyon.

“Don’t know, thought you were keepin’ track,” Marty says, sniffing hard again, and it’s then that Rust realizes the only things they can hear out here are themselves.

The back of his neck prickles sharp and he’s suddenly sweating inside his windbreaker, enough that he has to fight the urge to strip it off to breathe. But save for the rattled sound of their breathing and footsteps there’s nothing, not a soul or a sound or any goddamn thing, like the world had been draped over with a wool blanket and muffled out. The birds don’t cry, the wind doesn’t move. It’s gone quiet enough to hear each rabbit-kick thump of his heart.

Only when Rust goes to turn and reach for Marty does he see them.

In the distance, wedged between the slender bodies of too many yearling trees cropped up together, packed into the thicket part of the forest. A hint of wooden bannister, something rich like mahogany—and dark maroon. Even from here Rust knows it’s carpet, the same ugly shade of red that used to be laid down in the living room floor of a little house in Texas.

He takes a step forward and then stops, reaching out blind at his side until his fingers brush the slick blue of Marty’s windbreaker.

“Up there, about thirty yards,” he says, looking straight ahead before raising his left arm to point. “You see them too?”

“What are we looking at?” Marty grunts, fishing around for his chapstick again. “The trees? State needs to get out here and clear some of this shit out.”

“No,” Rust says, one word passed back like an offering plate over his shoulder as he moves forward through the undergrowth, boots soles deafening in this void of quiet. He had something else he was going to say to Marty, can feel it wilting and withering away in the back of his mind, but it must’ve been unimportant, must’ve been nothing at all to begin with.

He needs to get to the stairs.

“Well then, what?” Marty asks, blowing out a weary sigh. His tube of lip balm slips between his fingers and hits the ground, and when he straightens back up from retrieving it he sees that Rust is nowhere to be found.

“R—Rust?” he tries, listening to the lonely sound of his own voice ring hollow in his ears. Nothing else moves or rustles; no familiar footfalls or an answering whistle. The rest of the world is quiet.

“Yeah, real fuckin’ funny, hiding behind one of these trees,” Marty says, though he reaches up to tug at the knot of his tie with cold fingers. “Christ knows I could find you in the pitch dark if you were moving, trot like a gaited horse with a limp.”

He breathes as quietly as he can and waits for Rust to step out from behind one of the fat-bellied oaks, brows drawn together with his ledger open and favorite pen working a mile a minute. A few long moments pass and it’s so quiet Marty swears he can hear the thud of his own heart, growing faster and more frantic with every beat.

There’s nothing out here but the two of them and some squirrels and scrawny rabbits, probably—he knows this, accepts it, took it for a goddamn fact the minute they broke past the tree line. But dread cracks like a cold egg and slips tendrils of fear down the back of his neck and into his arms, making his feet shuffle forward a few steps on their own accord when the ice starts to bleed into his stomach.

“Rust?” Marty calls, a little louder this time, pushing as much lead and brass into his voice as he can manage. “You’d better get back over here, I’m calling this one. Ain’t shit out here worth seeing and you know it.”

He takes a few more steps ahead, edging around the twisted roots of a tree that looks deader than all the rest, like it’d been struck by lightning in the past handful of years and left to bleed out dry. Marty braces a palm on its trunk as he tries to maneuver around the uprooting base and then snatches his hand like he’d been burnt. The bark feels cold, too, like it’d been grown from metal than anything that used to thrum with life.

His breath starts rattling harder in his chest, and it’s so cold out here now that it burns all the way down to his lungs. The trees and foliage are getting thicker and scratch like claws on the arms of his jacket, and it’s darker than he remembers, too damn dark for high noon with the sun burning somewhere just out of sight but his feet carry him ahead anyhow like they know the way he doesn’t and—

Marty stumbles into a wide clearing, lit up with the hazy midday sun trying to break through the October sky overhead. It’s just as silent here as it was behind him, but his labored breathing sounds stupid now, hackneyed and uncalled for. He takes a moment to suck in a few deep breaths and then laughs, can see a hint of familiar blue slipping into the trees on the other side of the clearing.

“You’re hell-bent on getting that exercise in today, aren’t you,” he wheezes, bending at the waist to rest his palms on his knees for a moment. “We out here playing red rover or something? For fuck’s sake.”

He waits for Rust to answer, staring at the leaves under his ruined suede shoes while his heart starts to slow down, and when he looks back up again the only thing cutting through the silence is a tall mirror.

It’s propped up against what looks like a dormant mulberry tree, the only one Marty could pick out in the clearing if he’d bothered to look. Old and ornate and only a little bit tarnished with age, like something his grandmother used to keep standing up in her dressing room, draped with a pashmina and her gold-chained pocketbook.

Marty looks around the perimeter of the clearing and swallows hard, reaching back to pull his gun off his belt. He keeps the safety thumbed on but holds it at the halfway-ready anyhow, finger teasing the trigger while he silently prays he’s got enough sense left to not shoot Rust on sight.

The face of the mirror looks mostly clean, only a little dusty and water-spotted, and he walks up to it at an angle until he sees his reflection staring back.

Dampness has darkened the cuffs of his khaki pants and his hair’s a little mussed on his forehead, enough that Marty reaches up to push it back into place with his fingers on impulse. His gun feels like a ten-pound weight in his right hand as he steps forward to look behind the carved frame, peering behind it but not touching anything this time. There’s only the smell of damp wood-rot and earth behind it, nothing but leaves and the bark of the mulberry tree.

Marty steps back to peer at his reflection again, and when he does he hears a twig snap from behind, close enough that chills light up like a rush of wildfire down his back.

He spins around on one heel with his revolver ready to fire and thumbs the safety off, Rust be damned now, eyes scouring the edges of the clearing for anything that moves.

“I’m with state police,” Marty says, looking between the trees with a glare masking like iron over his face while his heart pounds enough to make him lightheaded. “Mirror’s a real nice fucking touch, real creative and all, but we’re asking you to come out now and give it up. My partner and I ain’t gonna be out here all day playing funhouse games when we’ve got better shit to do.”

Silence. All quiet, enough that it feels like a hand pressing down on him, and Marty’s been around the block enough times to know when he’s being watched.

“Try anything fast and I will shoot you on sight,” he says, turning in a slow circle, tension coiling through his body like a rusted wire. “Drop any weapons you might have and come on out now, the jig’s up. We’ve all had enough fun for one day.”

At the end of his arc Marty is face to face with the old mirror again, the silver-backed glass tilted up just enough now that he can only see himself from the waist up, the upper half filled with high branches and the overcast sky glowing like cultured pearl.

He bites into his lip and inches forward, just enough to kick out with his foot and knock the mirror down lower on its hinges. The movement is fast and all he does is blink once, but in the space between his lashes he catches something dark shift at one corner of the glass while branches rustle and whisper behind him.

Marty doesn’t even bother to turn and fire his gun. He doesn’t think, doesn’t stop, only crashes through the other side of the clearing and breaks into a run.  
  



	3. Chapter 3

  
Rust stands a few yards from the foot of the staircase with his gun held at his side, ledger left somewhere in the underbrush behind him where he doesn’t remember dropping it.

It looks harmless enough, something plucked from a midcentury home with bad carpeting leftover from the tail-end of the seventies. He knows because the realtor suggested he and Claire rip it up and put in tile or hardwood if they wanted, but by then the baby was four months away and they didn’t have the time or the money for an overhaul.

Here and now he feels locked in place, unable to move back or ahead. There isn’t a single leaf littered on the stairs and they lead straight up to nothing, the last step a good ten or twelve feet off the ground before dropping straight down. The bannister looks like it might’ve been polished and waxed last week for how it catches the light, and Rust counts sixteen identical steps to the top.

One foot forward and he sees something move near the staircase. She peeks out from behind the bannister before giggling and disappearing again, though her tiny bare feet don’t make any noise when they touch the ground.

Rust isn’t scared. Olivia Lamar had her jaw ripped off and left out here for nobody to find, but he isn’t scared, has really never felt more peace in his whole life. It blooms warm and syrupy in his stomach like peach tea left out in the sun, spreading out to the tips of his fingers as good as a top-shelf high, and he doesn’t think about the Job. He doesn’t think about Marty or the glass eye or why he left his notebook full of murder notes behind.

“Olivia?” he calls, moving closer to the staircase. “Are you there?”

He calls Olivia’s name one more time as he scans around the clearing, but that isn’t who answers.

“Daddy!” a tiny toddler’s voice calls, giggling from somewhere above. “You find me.”

Rust’s throat closes up before he can even see again, blinking through the grey spots suddenly clouding over his vision. His stomach drops like a lead balloon but his eyes roll skyward, and sitting there on the top step he finds Sophia.

She looks like she did just before she died. Honey curls tied back with a ribbon, wearing her little yellow shift dress with the flowers embroidered on it that Claire’s mother had made. It’s close to forty degrees out here but her feet are bare and she isn’t wearing a coat or sweater, skin just as warm and soft as he remembers before the accident.

“We play hide and seek,” she says in her tiny voice, looking down at him with her hands tucked between her knees. “I found the good spot.”

Rust knows she’s dead but then he doesn’t. He knows she’s buried under a white marble stone somewhere in the far corner of a cemetery in Houston because he went and saw it the last time he was in Texas, laid down on it even though there was a wake across the road and didn’t get back up again for two hours.

But here she is, picture perfect. She’s here and she’s whole—it’s her.

He’s been looking for her.

“Sophia,” Rust croaks, watching his own breath bloom when it touches the cold air. “Where’s your jacket, baby?”

She ignores him and shakes her head, curly ponytail bouncing from side to side. “You find me,” she repeats again, curling her toes into the maroon carpet of the staircase. “Gotta come get me.”

“I don’t think you should be playing up there, sweetheart,” Rust says, taking another step forward, feeling the navel-tug pull of everything she is. “It’s dangerous, being up that high.”

His throat tightens up again but he manages to push the words out in a hoarse whisper. “I don’t want you to fall.”

“I’m not,” Sophia says, indignant, mirroring the same look he remembers seeing on Claire’s face sometimes. “You gotta come find me.”

Rust watches her for a moment and then relents, walking until his fingers brush the bottom of banister. The wood is warm under his fingers this time, and he wraps his hand around it as he takes the first step toward the top.  
  


~*~*~*~  
  


Marty knows he’s going to die.

He’s been running for longer than he’s ever run before—longer than the timed quarter-miles they had to lap at the police academy, longer and faster than he’s ever gone on the fucking treadmill. Each breath drawn in feels like a frozen knife blade down his windpipe and his lungs have long since ignited, ready to burst and pop down deep in his chest.

There’s nothing running behind him in the sense that it’s crashing through the brush, but he can feel it—he can feel it coming and that’s more than enough.

Branches and brambles are cutting his hands as he tries to push through them, shoes slip-sliding when he stumbles through patches of wet leaves. Marty hasn’t looked anywhere but ahead in what feels like hours but when he glances to the side, he almost falls when he sees another man running through the trees draped over in shadow.

The yearling oaks and sycamores are too dense out here, packed too tightly and it almost looks like a wooden web threaded together—but through the adrenaline making his eyes vibrate he can see the other man running with a gun in his hand, ducking around clumps of branches before disappearing and reappearing a moment later.

It’s like an old flicker show’s been slowed down and spliced into the real world, something off-kilter about it all but Marty doesn’t have the presence of mind left to wonder—until he shouts Rust’s name in something akin to hope or desperation and the other man shouts it a moment later, too.

The way it echoes sounds like it’s bouncing off hard rock in lieu of a forest thicket. Marty knows down to his marrow it was just the ricochet of a misguided echo, but then the other man yells for Rust again and he realizes that it’s his own voice calling through the trees—his voice pitched back even though his mouth never moved to form the name.

And then Rust is yelling for him from somewhere ahead, close but too damn far. _Here, I’m over here!_ , and Marty runs blind, runs like he’s never run before with all of hell snapping close at his heels.

A burst of gunfire sounds in the distance, one round squeezed off right after another. When Marty looks through the trees the other man has stopped running, lost somewhere behind him, but now his only thought is lit up like a sky flare around Rust.

He breaks through the trees and stumbles into a new clearing, so exhausted and caught off guard that he drops to his knees with a thud that he feels in his teeth. It feels like he’s been running for miles and he doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to get back up again, doesn’t know if he could even begin to try, but then with his palms spread wide on the cold forest floor he looks up and sees his partner.

Rust is standing at the second step from the very top of an old staircase, all termite-rotted wood and red carpeting gone sun-faded and moldy from the rain. It looks like a death trap cut like a picture from a condemned house but Marty’s eyes only linger near the top, wide and unblinking in the face of what’s looking back.

“Rust,” he rasps in nothing more than a hoarse whisper, scrabbling forward on his hands and knees through the smell of wet decay all around him. “Rust—no, no, oh my God.”

Marty’s knees have turned to rubber underneath him and he can feel something warm and wet on his face, doesn’t know if it’s blood or tears or maybe both. Every inch of his skin feels like it was scalded with a live cattle prod and when the gaping maw at the top of the stairs opens wider, he knows the sound that breaks out of him is a sob.

“Get down,” he whispers, and this is like one of those nightmares where he needs to scream but his voice won’t carry, won’t reach in time. “Rust, you—you gotta get down from there.”

The silence that was packed around them like cotton is gone in an instant, and the thing Rust is staring into starts making a high-pitched hum, getting louder and louder until Marty can’t hear his own thoughts anymore. Rust seems transfixed by it where he stands on that second step, staring into the face of open blackness cut into thin air. It’s bigger than him, taller than two men put together—like it could swallow him down him whole.

In that moment, Marty knows that it wants to.

When he reaches the bottom stair the air is screaming, inhuman and never-ending shrieking. It makes his bones ache and his head pound but he crawls up the staircase anyhow, nearly falling through the rotted carpet and planking on the third step when his knee breaks through it, hands still bleeding from where the branches and vines had cut him before.

It’s a slow climb to the top, as hard as any trek to the top of Everest, and Marty doesn’t think he’ll make it—knows he might only get there when it’s already too late.

But he gets a hand around Rust’s ankle, fingers curling like claws into the hem of his pants and the tendon at his heel, and the swirling thing above them only screams louder when he does.

  
  
  


Sophia is holding her hand out and waiting, like she always had before crossing the street downtown. Rust wants to take it. He doesn’t know where they’re going but he’ll let her take them there if she wants to.

He’ll do anything.

“We gonna go home now, Daddy?” Sophia asks, and the wind is rustling through the trees now but hem of her yellow dress doesn’t move.

“We can,” Rust says, trying to soak in the look of her, every little detail he might’ve since forgotten. She has a strawberry birthmark on the back of one knee that he hadn’t remembered, had let it slip through the broken fissures in his mind. “If you want to.”

“You gotta come,” she says, a little more urgently now, something in her voice out of place for a toddler. “You gotta hurry.”

Rust feels something warmer at his back, like the sun shining on him through the trees, but he takes Sophia’s hand anyhow. She smiles when he does, showing off her perfect little baby teeth.

“I won,” she says, and Rust blinks at her, pressing his thumb against her tiny palm.

“What?” he asks.

He’s looking at her when he feels something lock around his right ankle and tug hard. Claws or fingers or hooks dig into the tendon there and he stumbles on the step, losing his balance just enough that it sends a jolt of fear shooting down his spine.

Sophia’s face flickers when he stumbles, and it isn’t her anymore. Isn’t her, never was her—and when he blinks the stairs are rotting and there’s something screaming overhead, a fire-branded heat around his ankle and the world gone dark.

Whatever has Rust’s ankle pulls hard again, and this time he lets himself fall back when it does.  
  


  
~*~*~*~  
  


They fall together from the fourth step near the top, tipping over the side not guarded by the banister before they hit the ground in a crumpled heap.

Rust is trying to shout but he can’t breathe, felt all the wind rush out of his lungs when he hit the ground with Marty still halfway on top of him. But he looks straight up into the sky above them and can see, now. He can see.

When his lungs hitch and fill back up again, he’s already howling. It hurts to look and he starts thrashing wild against Marty, lashing out until his elbow makes landfall somewhere with a dull thud.

Marty grunts and curses but doesn’t let go, trying to thread his legs around Rust’s to keep him still long enough to recognize him.

“It ain’t real,” Marty yells over the piercing scream while Rust struggles against him, and there shouldn’t be a slim chance in hell that he can get the upper hand on his partner but Rust is halfway sobbing now, fingers gone weaker around Marty’s forearms. “Whatever you see up there ain’t real, it ain’t fucking real, Rust—do you hear me?”

“I thought it was her,” Rust sobs, gone limp in Marty’s arms now. “I thought she was real.”

“Listen to me—I’m real!” Marty shouts, looking down at where Rust’s laying on the ground underneath him, and he thinks he sees a dark stain bleeding through the front of the windbreaker but it’s gone when he blinks again, a mirage fizzled out into nothing.

“Marty,” Rust says, blinking fast as recognition threads through his voice. “Oh shit, Marty—fuck, I’m so fucking sorry.”

“Yeah alright, but we gotta get the fuck out of here,” he pants, scrambling up onto his bruised knees while pain pounds through his body. “Right now, right the fuck—”

The screaming turns into the thundering howl of a freight train and darkness drops like a blue velvet curtain. Marty can only see the whites of Rust’s eyes, the faint glint of light there reflecting whatever it is opening wider in the sky above them.

“It only wants me, Marty,” he says, voice gone eerily foreign and calm. “It picked me after the Lamar girl. You—you gotta go, go back home. It doesn’t need you.”

Marty wants to laugh but can’t, and he hates that look on Rust’s face so he shakes him hard, reaching down to grab his jaw in one hand.

“You crazy motherfucker,” he half-sobs, getting a fistful of blue windbreaker and yanking the other man halfway off the ground. “As if I’d come all this way just to leave your ungrateful ass out here—thought our fucking partnership meant more than that.”

He hauls Rust to his feet and then starts pulling him along, yanking hard on one of his arms like he’s leading a bullheaded mule. “You’ve got to come on,” Marty hollers, feeling fear twisting like a snake in his stomach. “You’ve got to come with me, man—we both gotta get back home.”

Rust can barely move but he tries, feels every ounce of energy bleeding out of his body like he’d been gutted and left for carrion. He keeps blinking in and out of something that smells like cold earth and damp rot, keeps catching scraps of yellow in the corner of his eye even though Sophia’s long gone.

When Marty finally gets a hand around his and holds on tight, he knows they’ve got to run.

And they do. Together, without letting go, trying to drag one another out of the darkened night.  
  


~*~*~*~  
  


Rust opens his eyes to look out over the empty rest stop. The sky is brighter here and his ass is cold and wet but there’s something warm and solid pressed up against his side, stirring with a few low curses as he comes back around. Both of them are slumped back against the familiar Chevy, still parked in the spot by the picnic tables.

“Holy shit,” Marty murmurs, groggily twisting his neck to one side, and they’re close enough that Rust hears the crack in his left ear. “Feel like I just got off the fucking bender of my life.”

Both men blink before they remember in tandem time, like they’d stepped on a trip wire at the same moment, and Marty stiffens up but doesn’t move from Rust’s side.

“Did you just have the craziest fucking—?”

“Dream?”

“Uh—shit, man. Yeah.”

“No,” Rust says, all but ripping open the front of his windbreaker to look for his cigarettes with trembling fingers. “Look at your hands. Look at our clothes.”

Marty’s hands are scratched, the dark blood since gone thick and coagulated. Their shoes are soaked and caked with mud and the knees of Marty’s khakis are so dirty they’re nearly black. He grunts and then reaches up, automatically, to knock a dead leaf out of Rust’s mussed hair.

“Wonder if we got roofied,” he murmurs, fair brows scrunching up into a hard line. “These rest stop places—I don’t know, man. And all this shit you see, you reckon you ever had one of them walking seizures before?”

“Not with my work partner at the same time,” Rust says, sucking down a third of his cigarette on the first pull before passing it over to Marty. “Wasn’t any kinda seizure.”

“Fuckin’ A,” Marty says, drawing in a shallow drag before blowing it out through his nose in a sigh. He passes the cigarette back over and Rust takes it without pause, smoking clear down to the filter before stubbing the butt on the craggy asphalt.

Marty pulls his right leg up to fish around in his pocket for a cough drop, and only then does Rust see his ledger wedged between them on the ground.

He picks it up while Marty unwraps the lozenge and pops it into his mouth, working the hard candy around so it clinks against his teeth while Rust stares at the black cover. It’s a little damp at the edges but otherwise unharmed, and he slips his finger under the elastic band but doesn’t open it yet.

“Well,” Marty says. “You got some notes in there on what the fuck just happened?”

Two crows light on the closest picnic bench to peer down into the metal trash bin, and Rust watches them for a long moment before he draws in a steadying breath and opens up the notebook.

The first few pages are neat and full of his slanting hand and a few sketches. Notes, drawings, a coffee ring courtesy of Geraci on his annotations from last week—and then in the middle, wedged between two clean ivory sheets, is a golden glass iris staring back at them. Stuck there with some of the same sweet-smelling amber he knows he’ll find on the tip of his knife.

Rust closes the cover and swallows thickly, can feel his own pulse pounding like bird wings in his throat. Marty takes the ledger out of his hands and tosses it into the grass a few feet away from them. Rust doesn’t move to pick it back up again.

“I don’t—” Marty starts before biting into his lip. “That wasn’t—none of it was fucking real. I don’t care if we both saw it, must’ve both gotten into the same Kool-Aid or some shit.”

But there’s fear in his voice, the smell raw and bitter-metallic and there for anybody to find. Rust can feel it bleeding between them, the truth having caught them both in a lashing snare trap.

“I saw her, Marty,” Rust says, and this time Marty doesn’t say anything. “It wasn’t her, but it—it was trying to be.”

And Marty thinks he has a pretty good idea but repeats it anyhow, saying the name so soft it almost comes out in a whisper.

Rust ducks his head and starts shaking, sucking in a pull of air that sounds like it was cut from his throat. He doesn’t get up and move away, and Marty doesn’t know what else to do, so he only clears his throat and tucks his arm around the other man’s shoulders.

“We’re alright now,” he says, squeezing Rust closer into his side, laughing a little breathless. “Got you out of there, didn’t I? Been working with you too long now to go and train up a new partner.”

Rust keeps shaking and Marty lets his lashes fall for a moment, tipping his head back against the trunk of their car. He only breathes for a long time, slow air pulled in and pushed out, and when he opens his own eyes they’re pinker and wetter than before but nobody but him and Rust have to know.

“Anyhow,” he sighs after a while, patting Rust’s shoulder a few times. “Look at the sky—starting to brighten up out here already.”

When Rust looks up he has to wipe his face on the cuff of his shirt, busying himself with pulling out another cigarette. He lights up and sucks down another pull but doesn’t try to shrug Marty’s arm off.

As sure as anything, the October sky is bright and china-blue, only marked with the pair of black crows as they take wing to the air and disappear over the tree line.

“Yeah,” Rust breathes out, tipping his head back next to Marty’s. “I reckon so.”  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some familiar motifs and images for ya nerves! I hope this was genuinely creepy for the sake of Halloween, but also that it was a good and honest read, or not too overwhelming in terms of imagery.
> 
> I'd love to hear any feedback! Thanks so much :)


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